In Britain, parliament is sovereign, it is where the power lies. At least, that is what they want you to think. A lot of power resides in a great many other places, including the boardrooms of major corporations, unelected senior civil servants, judges, and the police and army.
The capitalist class have never hesitated to use all means at its disposal to defeat revolutionary challenge to its rule, from ‘patriotic’ thugs to outright fascists, with police batons and ‘hanging’ judges and their soft power in the mainstream media and control of social media platforms.
Capitalists also ignore laws if they can – in 1950-1 the Labour government tried to nationalise iron and steel production which was a profitable branch of industry. They faced massive, concerted reaction from the capitalist class to block nationalisation and effectively defeated it in time for the 1951 Tory government to simply revoke the law.
If the bosses don’t like a law, they fight tooth and nail, threaten to sabotage the economy with capital flight, currency speculation, closing businesses, mass sacking of workers and so on. Then when working people organise to fight back, we are told to accept the law and do as we are told.
Despite the reality of how power under capitalism is distributed, there is a refrain from some establishment politicians and trade union leaders about the importance of parliamentary opposition to the capitalists, social reactionaries and far right.
Whilst it is true that having a well organised left wing opposition in parliament, as well as the devolved powers, is helpful, the reality is that the power of our movement and ideas is not in these institutions and never will be a dominant force there.
Since the emergence of capitalism 200 years ago in England, working people, the oppressed and the poor have had to fight for every right. We occasionally had fairweather friends in parliament or the press, but without our mass movements we never would have secured the reforms or concessions many imagine happen naturally.
Parliamentary sovereignty
Even the idea parliament is sovereign was the result of huge battles fought by people hundreds of years. The right to rule for the monarch was challenged by the English revolution of 1642-51 when parliamentarians fought King Charles I to decide whether the elected representatives or the unelected monarch had the final say. The defeat and execution of Charles I was a scandal across Europe, a tyrant brought down by his own subjects!
Oliver Cromwell created a republic that lasted from 1649-1660 when Charles II was given power. His son James II abused his power, imposing unpopular policies, alienating many protestants and threatening to use the army against the people. There was a revolt by parliamentarians and the popular masses which resulted in the invasion by William of Orange from the Netherlands.
The overthrow of the Jacobean monarchy created the basis of the modern distribution of power with a ‘constitutional monarch’ and a parliament that enshrined more powers for itself. The supremacy of parliament was introduced through force and resistance, not simply a parliamentary act.
The right to vote for your local MP and not have them imposed on you by the government was established through mass resistance when an opponent of King George III, John Wilkes, was elected as MP for Middlesex in 1768 but was then replaced with a supporter of the King in 1769 who had lost the election. The government forced two by-elections which saw Wilkes returned three times. When he won a fourth time they voided the result and had a vote in parliament to declare the opponent the winner.
Wilkes led a popular protest movement, not just focussing on his situation but broadening the campaign to demand more regular elections, the publishing of the records of parliamentary debates and the exclusion of placemen – men who had just been granted offices by those in power.
Importantly, Wilkes had been imprisoned a year before for seditious libel against the king and government for publishing an article critical of them. His jailing saw large protests by his supporters. During one, in St George’s fields in May 1768, soldiers shot dead a number of unarmed protesters after reading them the Riot Act and ordering them to disperse. The news of the killing spread throughout London and there were serious riots, allegedly leading to the King considering abdication.
Against slavery
The standard view from the British establishment is that slavery was bad, but happened a long time ago and was stopped by enlightened forward thinking progressives like William Wilberforce MP. Slavery remains with us – millions of slaves are sold around the world today. But Black chattel slavery (selling Black people as if they were cattle at auction) was not abolished only due to a parliamentary declaration.
The chattel slavery model had been useful for the early stages of capitalism when landowners needed cheap and plentiful supply of labour to work their plantations. The brutality and violence of those institutions was hard to maintain without risk of revolt.
There had been growing slave revolts across the colonies and the USA, most famously in Haiti when Black slaves revolted against the French rulers and carried out a revolution to free themselves – believing that ‘all men were created equal’ and that ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ should be put into practice, not just be pretty words on a page.
As capitalism developed some capitalists wanted to end the barbaric practice of slavery and convert people into low paid waged workers. This was also in large part caused by economic factors, as WEB Dubois argues “the diminishing returns of the African slave trade itself, the bankruptcy of the West Indian sugar economy through the Haitian revolution, the interference of Napoleon and the competition of Spain. Without this pressure of economic forces, Parliament would not have yielded so easily to the abolition crusade.”
This was the allegedly ‘progressive’ wing of capitalism – William Wilberforce is a good example. He fought to end the slave trade (not slavery itself) but was also bitterly opposed to trade union and workers’ rights.
The focus on Wilberforce is because he led the parliamentary wing, but the broad popular opposition was led by Thomas Clarkson, who travelled up and down the country agitating for abolition, helping set up around 1,400 abolitionist committees that held public rallies and protests. The sign of the growth of this movement was that an initial petition in 1792 collected 400,000 signatures, and another in 1812 collected nearly 1.4 million signatures.
The battle for the franchise
Not many people could vote in the 17th century, usually only a small number of landowners. During the 19th century as capitalism forced more into towns and cities to work and they had no property, a massive underclass was formed who had no political rights and laboured in appalling conditions.
Meanwhile, the parliament was full of part time MPs who were also industrialists, merchants, landowners and aristocrats. The class divisions looked stark and obvious.
Working people and the poor had to rely on sympathetic MPs, usually from the Whig Party who were also rich members of the establishment but slightly more liberal than the Tory Party. The Whigs represented a wing of the middle and capitalist classes that wanted to extend capitalism but saw the value in improving wages and working conditions to ensure that there was no revolution. The Tories were more based on the richer landowners and farmers.
In 1819 a large demonstration in St Peter’s Field’s in Manchester calling for parliamentary reform gathered to hear the radical leader Henry Hunt. The peaceful protest was attacked by armed soldiers on horseback who killed 11 and wounded over 400 with their swords. This was called the battle of Peterloo – after the battle of Waterloo in 1815. The government responded by sending Henry Hunt to prison for 2 years and publicly congratulating the soldiers.
This was a period of radical newspapers and journals, or revolutionary ideals spreading through different sections of society, of merciless lampooning of the rich and powerful who gorged whilst people starved.
But the clamour for reform and greater democratic rights was confounded in 1831 when the new government decided not to pursue constitutional reform. Mass protests and riots in Nottingham and Bristol saw extensive damage to property and the homes of rich and church leaders attacked. In Bristol the prison and the Bishops palace were set on fire and 70 people died in the urban uprising.
This led to the 1832 reform act which saw some improvements with more men being able to vote and more parliamentary seats created in the rapidly growing industrial towns so they could send additional representatives.
However, out of around 30 million people still less than 2 million could vote. The urgent need for some kind of political representation for the masses was still keenly felt. This led to the Chartist movement of 1840-1860s, the first mass working class movement that issued petitions for its Charter, drawn up in 1838 by two activists in the London Working Men’s Association, William Lovett and Francis Place.
The Charter had six demands
• All men to have the vote (universal manhood suffrage)
• Voting should take place by secret ballot
• Parliamentary elections every year, not once every five years
• Constituencies should be of equal size Members of Parliament should be paid
• The property qualification for becoming a Member of Parliament should be abolished
The Chartists organised demonstrations and strikes, including a mass strike in Halifax in 1842. There was an armed uprising attempted in 1839, primarily in Newport. Chartism was seen as a serious threat to the establishment who detested the idea of the masses getting political power. In 1848 an armed Chartist gathering on Kennington Common was going to march on parliament to demand the implementation of the Charter, but it was faced down by the British army and thousands of special constables drafted in to prevent a revolution.
Agitation and protest continued until two further reform acts were passed, one in 1867 and another in 1884. The main gain of the 1867 act allowed men who lived in an area to vote (i.e. renters not people who owned property), which expanded the voters in towns and cities. The 1884 act was more wide-ranging and significantly increased the number of men who could vote.
Women’s democratic rights
It is clear how fragile democratic rights for women are when you see the latest outbursts from US political leaders like JD Vance threatening to relativise the suffrage depending on how many children (or not) a woman has.
In Britain, the fight for women to get the vote had been growing stronger from the turn of the 19th century – when it started with a tiny minority of advocates. The first major push was in 1866, but this was ignored until the radical Suffragettes movement emerged in the early 20th century, using a combination of mass protests, direct action, vandalism and even attempted assassinations of reactionary political figures like Winston Churchill to win their demands.
The moderate wing of the movement was the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) led by Millicent Fawcett, but the radical wing of the movement was led by the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), which was founded in 1903. Many of the initial leaders were also socialists in the Independent Labour Party (ILP), including Emmeline, Christabel and Sylvia Pankhurst
The WSPU was frustrated at the passive resistance of the NUWSS and began their campaign of direct action starting by disrupting meetings with right wing MPs – starting with Sir Edward Grey. As protestors were bundled out, Christabel Pankhurst slapped a police inspector in the mouth and was arrested. In court she justified her actions, saying, “We cannot make an orderly protest because we do not have the means whereby citizens may do such things.”
It was not until the aftermath of the First World War when the Russian Revolution of 1917 had overthrown the Tsar and the capitalist government and given women equal votes to men that the establishment in Britain realised they had to act, introducing women’s suffrage for over 28 year olds in 1918.
The welfare state
The modern welfare state, today devastated and eroded by Tories and Labour alike, was also the product not of nice MPs deciding to be kind, but the horrors of the 1930s, the Great Depression and the violence of World War Two.
The standard narrative today is that Winston Churchill became Prime Minister, and everyone loved him as a strong patriotic leader but then an ungrateful electorate voted him out when the war ended and elected Clement Attlee’s Labour government.
Many millions of people in Britain had been angry at the mass unemployment of the 1930s. The Jarrow March to London in 1936 was a famous example of demanding social measures to end unemployment and poverty. After the war the working class – many conscripted and armed – were demanding meaningful change. After the war there were revolts in the British army, including in Egypt, where ranks and file soldiers exerted their own demands.
Quintin Hogg – a Tory MP – rightfully warned in 1943 that “If we do not give the people social reform they are going to give you social revolution.” Thankfully a liberal, Beveridge, had done a report in 1943 into the 7 wants of British society that gave a framework for the Labour Party to advocate for a new kind of social settlement. This was the start of the real modern welfare state, including plans for massive social housing expansion.
The NHS was the jewel in the crown for this period after the war, but it only really came about because Aneurin Bevin, a Labour left winger, personally fought for it – in the context of the revolutionary upheavals after the war across Europe and beyond. It was the product of the crystallisation of class forces, which the ruling class eyes jealously and would love to mostly privatise for private gain.
Workers’ rights
No gain of the working class movement has ever been freely given. From the start of the creation of the modern mass working class in the late 18th century through to the industrial revolution and beyond, the capitalist class and their governments have always sought to restrict and contain the power of working people. This happened through curtailing trade union rights, imprisoning leaders of the movement, police violence and so on.
After two mutinies in the Royal Navy as sailors demanded shore leave and better working conditions, the government responded by hanging the leaders and banning trade unions with the Combination Acts. Trade Unions remained banned in Britain until 1824 and even then only allowed with severe restrictions on their activities, including a ban on political strike action and solidarity strikes with other workers.
Unions were eventually fully legalised in 1871 – primarily because unions could engage in peaceful strikes and not suffer financial penalty for restraining trade and profits. Despite this change in the law after the famous 1873 Gas Workers strike a number of strikers were sent to prison for 12 months on charges of ‘conspiracy’.
Attempts in the 1960s and 70s to restrict rank and file workers actions in their workplaces was met with Labour trying to impose In Place of Strife (legislated as The Industrial Relations Act), legislation to undermine grassroots action. The response from the movement was massive unofficial strikes. In December 1970 to January 1971 over half a million workers took strike action against the Act. A further strike of two million workers occurred in March 1971.
The Tory government led by Edward Heath took on the workers movement between 1970-4 and lost. Massive strikes and protests rocked the country, leading to a general election that saw the Tories defeated at the ballot box.
Workers’ solidarity is common with too many examples to give in this article. At the long running strike at the Grunwick Film Processing Laboratories in Willesden, north London from 1976 to 1978, the leaders of the Yorkshire miners at the time, Arthur Scargill led a detachment of striking miners to join their mass picket lines. In the mass nurses strike of 1988 they were joined with solidarity strikes by workers in various other sectors, including some council workers, miners, post workers, firefighters, and workers in the car industry. During the Gate Gourmet strike in 2005 – mainly women who worked in catering for airlines – baggage handlers walked out on strike in solidarity with them.
When workers are united they are more powerful and can take on capitalists, collectively rather than just based on individual workplace issues. This is why the anti union laws imposed by the Tories and maintained by Labour aim to prevent solidarity action and taking political strike action, they fear the power of working people.
Mass protests and strikes
During the 1980s, the vicious right wing government of Margaret Thatcher sought to destroy the workers’ movement and crush the left wherever they had power. Although Thatcher had huge political power – and the Labour opposition eventually compromised and largely passively accepted her policies – there was resistance.
Mass protests against austerity in the early 1980s kicked off the resistance. The urban riots in Brixton, Toxteth and Tottenham in the summer of 1981 rocked the British establishment, protesting against police racist violence and growing structural unemployment particularly for young black people.
The miners strike in 1984-5 was a year-long fight to save the mining industry, which saw a mass movement emerge to support the miners so they could sustain their strike as long as possible.
The end of the 1980s saw Thatcher impose a reactionary Poll Tax – a tax to fund local councils. People opposed it because it did not take into account wealth or property – it was a flat tax. Millions of people refused to pay, thousands went to prison, and a massive riot broke out in Trafalgar Square, the first since 1887 when the left wing Social Democratic Federation organised a protest against unemployment and anti Irish racism and their protest was attacked by police and soldiers – called Bloody Sunday in the press afterwards.
By the late 1980s people were fed up with growing poverty and the policies of the Tories and there were fed up waiting for the useless Labour Party to win an election.
When Labour was in government under Tony Blair we saw huge protests against the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq from 2001-2005. Over a million people marched through London on 15 February 2003 to oppose Labour’s imperialist policies. In parliament there was no serious opposition to the war, the Liberal Democrats opposed it until the invasion started then backed the troops going on. People had to take action themselves.
What do we do when under attack? Get up fight back!
This was a brief account of the kind of resistance we have put up to the capitalist class over the last few hundred years. The bosses and their media mouthpieces want you to believe that people are always apathetic, or even outright accept the imposition of terrible policies from the governments representing the rich and powerful.
Some liberals or Labour people urge restraint on mass movements or strike action, telling people to focus on elections alone as the way to resolve problems.
But we know parliament is stacked against us, and even if you did win a majority in parliament, the state is not neutral in these class conflicts. Getting good people in parliament is not a bad idea but we cannot rely on it as a strategy.
But there are always people who are willing to take a stand, to get active, to get organised. People who move from passivity to action. These are the people who can fight for a better world, regardless of government. We need not just resistance but revolution, a fight by millions of people to overthrow capitalism, establish a new society and finally create a world fit for humanity, free of oppressions.
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